Cassandra Fairbanks

Cassandra Fairbanks (born March 11, 1985) is an American journalist and activist. As a journalist, she has worked for the Russian state-funded international news agency Sputnik (2015–2017), and far-right American media websites Big League Politics (2017) and The Gateway Pundit (2017–present). As an activist, she is best known for "Find the Dancing Man," her successful 2015 social media campaign against fat shaming, and for helping to organize the DeploraBall in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the 2017 inauguration of President Donald Trump.[6] In 2018, Fairbanks arranged the unexpected appearance of prolific leaker and transgender activist Chelsea Manning at what The Washington Post headlined as "a far-right pro-Trump bash".[7]

Cassandra Fairbanks
Born (1985-03-11) March 11, 1985[1][2][3][4]
OccupationOnline journalist
NationalityAmerican
Years active2014–present
Website
districtherald.com[5]

In 2020, Fairbanks submitted evidence to the legal team defending WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in his London extradition hearing, and posted audio online of a September 2019 phone call to her from Arthur Schwartz, a conservative consultant with close ties to Richard Grenell, U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Schwartz told Fairbanks that Grenell "took orders from" President Trump when the ambassador secretly brokered Assange's April 2019 arrest at Ecuador's London embassy, where Assange had been given political asylum.

Early life

Cassandra Fairbanks grew up in a small town in central Massachusetts, an hour from Boston.[8] She traces her ancestry[9] to Jonathan and Grace (Smith) Fairbanks, English colonists who in 1633 immigrated to New England and circa 1637 built the Fairbanks House, now North America's oldest surviving timber frame house, in Dedham, Massachusetts.[10] After high school, she enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to study physics, but dropped out after a few months. Moving to California, she attended the Los Angeles Recording School and became a sound engineer.[8] In that capacity, she traveled the country,[11] working for bands in what Cosmopolitan calls "the Warped Tour vein."[8]

Activism

Fairbanks's activism began with Greenpeace environmentalism, followed by animal rights protests at SeaWorld and circuses. In 2013, she took part in the hacktivist collective Anonymous and helped run a popular Anonymous Twitter account.[8] By then living in Pittsburgh, she traveled to Ohio and helped organize the outcry over the Steubenville High School rape case.[4] In 2015, Fairbanks spent several months with Black Lives Matter in Ferguson, Missouri, amid civil unrest stemming from the 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer.[12]

Social media

In 2015, photos posted on the anonymous chat board 4chan[8] created what the BBC called one of the year's "biggest internet sensations"[3] by showing an obese, 47-year-old Englishman dancing exuberantly at a concert. "Spotted this specimen trying to dance the other week," the caption read. "He stopped when he saw us laughing."[13] Incensed at the fat shaming, Fairbanks launched a social media campaign to "Find the Dancing Man".[14] "If I see something wrong," she said, "then I try and fix it." With a friend, Fairbanks created a GoFundMe account to locate the man and fly him to Los Angeles, where she lived, for what turned out to be a celebrity-packed party with 1,000 guests[15] at Avalon Hollywood, one of L.A.'s hottest clubs.[16] During a westbound stopover in New York, the man danced on NBC's Today Show. Once in L.A., he was photographed bending elbows with a beaming Monica Lewinsky.[17] The next day, he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the L.A. Dodgers' home game against San Diego.[18] The viral campaign raised $70,000 for anti-bullying and positive body image charities in the U.S. and UK, and made Fairbanks, again in the words of the BBC, a "social media star."[3]

Shift to right

In 2016, Cassandra Fairbanks "underwent something of a political transformation," according to BBC News.[3] Having begun the year as a supporter of Hillary Clinton's main rival within the Democratic Party, Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Fairbanks was by fall rallying her 70K Twitter followers to support Donald Trump.[3] In an October 2016 episode of BBC Television's Panorama, the world's longest-running news television program,[19] Fairbanks said, "I'm going to be voting for Donald Trump. I think that Hillary Clinton is a terribly dangerous person."[20]

Cosmopolitan subsequently named her a leader in the defiant Deplorable movement, alluding to Hillary Clinton's campaign description of half of Donald Trump's supporters as "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic."[21] In January 2017, Fairbanks was one of the organizers of the DeploraBall, an unofficial inaugural ball at Washington's National Press Club to celebrate Trump's victory.[6] Threatening to shut down the black-tie event,[22] Antifa circulated a list of "high-value" targets including Cassandra Fairbanks.[11] Three alleged accomplices with DisruptJ20, a Washington, D.C.-based group of mostly anarchists[23] that included the DC Antifascist Coalition, plotted to infiltrate the ball and infect the ventilation system with butyric acid,[24] which can burn skin and lead to loss of vision.[25] A 34-year-old Washington, D.C. man later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit assault in connection with the planned attack.[24]

In 2020, after criticizing nationwide riots against police brutality and racism, Fairbanks claimed to have received death threats from "Antifa members" on her Twitter. Following this, Fairbanks claimed that trespassers, during the night between May 31 and June 1, set upon her house, pounding on windows, detonating fireworks directed towards her residence, and shooting firearms, at which point Fairbanks fled. A supporter set up a GoFundMe campaign to help with moving costs, which accrued over $24,000.[26] In the weeks following the incident, Right Wing Watch purported to refute Fairbanks's claims, citing "conversations with eight of Fairbanks' nearby neighbors," "nonexistent coverage in local press," and a report obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department— all of which corroborate only the claim that fireworks were detonated nearby (though no evidence suggests any were directed at Fairbanks's residence), while the MPD's "ShotSpotter" gunshot detection system recorded no shots in the area on the night of May 31/early morning of June 1.[27]

Journalism

Fairbanks's writing career began in 2014 as an outgrowth of her activism. For nine months at the Free Thought Project,[28] she reported mostly about police brutality.[8] In 2015 she wrote for PINAC News, continuing to chronicle controversial policing around the United States.[29] That summer, she live streamed her own arrest while covering anti-police brutality protests on Interstate 70 in St. Louis.[30]

Also in 2015, Fairbanks was hired as a reporter for the Russian state-funded international news agency Sputnik, and moved to Washington, D.C., for the position.[8] Her first article (sans byline[31]), "NSA Struggles to Recruit New Talent in US Post-Snowden," appeared in April 2015.[32] She remained at Sputnik until May 2017.[33] In early 2016, while still with Sputnik, Fairbanks also wrote 10 bylined articles for Teen Vogue.[34]

In April 2017, Fairbanks and right-wing provocateur[35] Mike Cernovich posed for a photo behind the lectern in the White House briefing room, each making an OK gesture at the camera. According to Britain's The Independent, this "sparked outcry on social media" because the hand sign can symbolize white power. Fairbanks denied the gesture was racist, citing her partial Puerto Rican ancestry (her mother is from San Juan[36]) to corroborate that she is not a white supremacist.[37] After journalist Emma Roller tweeted the photo, which she captioned "just two people doing a white power hand gesture in the White House," Fairbanks sued in federal court alleging defamation.[38] A year later, the court found that Fairbanks failed to show that Roller posted the image with actual malice.[39]

Upon leaving Sputnik, Fairbanks spent April–November 2017 as a senior reporter at Big League Politics,[40] which The New York Times has called "an obscure right-wing news site" given to promoting conspiracy theories and writing favorably about white nationalist candidates.[41]

WikiLeaks

In October 2017, Fairbanks reported for Big League Politics that U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), after visiting Julian Assange at the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where the WikiLeaks founder was in asylum, said that in exchange for a pardon, Assange would provide evidence that Russia did not hack the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.[42]

In January 2020, National Public Radio subpoenaed Fairbanks seeking documents and electronically stored information relating to her conversations with Assange, among others, including journalists. The subpoena was part of a defamation lawsuit against NPR by Texas money manager Ed Butowsky over his purported involvement in a now-retracted Fox News story alleging that the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich was connected to the 2016 leak of DNC emails to WikiLeaks. Fairbanks's attorney responded that since the subpoena requested work product protected under the District of Columbia's reporter shield law, "no documents or other things will be produced pursuant to the subpoena."[43] Fairbanks tweeted her loyalty to Assange, recalling that she'd camped outside Ecuador's London embassy for days "confronting the cops" who ultimately arrested him. "NPR lawyers are on 90 different drugs if they think I would ever give up a single sentence of a convo I've had with him."[44]

On February 24, 2020, Politico reported that Fairbanks had submitted evidence to the legal team defending Assange in his London extradition hearing.[45] The evidence consists of screenshots and recorded phone calls spanning October 2018 – September 2019 that Fairbanks had with Arthur Schwartz, identified by The New York Times as a "conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr." Schwartz also had close ties to Richard Grenell, U.S. ambassador to Germany.[46] Schwartz told Fairbanks that Ambassador Grenell was "taking orders from the president" when, through covert, back-channel negotiations,[47] Grenell facilitated Assange's April 2019 arrest by London's Metropolitan Police Service at the Ecuadorian embassy.[45]

On February 27, 2020, The Daily Dot reported that Fairbanks posted audio of a September 2019 phone call from Schwartz to her in which he stated that Ambassador Grenell "took orders from the president"[48] in brokering Assange's arrest.[49] In a separate video,[50] likewise linked by The Daily Dot via embedded tweets from Fairbanks, she said that when she visited Assange at the embassy in January 2019, she told him the U.S. was arranging his arrest. In March, Fairbanks again visited Assange. After being sequestered in a room locked from the outside as officials demanded Assange submit to a full-body search,[51] Fairbanks was allowed to speak with him for only eight minutes (instead of the allotted two hours) in a conference room that she said was "filled with bugs and video cameras." Fairbanks also said Schwartz told her the U.S. would not "go after" Assange over the DNC leaks or for Vault 7—leaked CIA files detailing the agency's electronic surveillance and cyber warfare capabilities that WikiLeaks published in 2017. Instead, Assange would be charged only in connection with Chelsea Manning's 2010 leaks.[49]

Chelsea Manning

"I don't believe anyone has done anything as remarkable as Chelsea Manning in my lifetime," tweeted Cassandra Fairbanks in 2013,[52] two months after the soldier was sentenced to 35 years in prison and a dishonorable discharge for having disclosed to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 military and diplomatic documents.[53] "I've been relentlessly supporting WikiLeaks since the first time I heard of them, and Manning," Fairbanks added in 2017.[54]

However, after Manning's early release in 2017,[55] Fairbanks was disappointed to see her siding with Antifa in a "March Against White Supremacy" at Berkeley, California, one day before a conservative "Free Speech Week" was set to begin.[56][57] "It's a real shame," Fairbanks tweeted, "since many of us (like me) fought for her right to free speech for fucking years."[58] Manning responded privately, angling to leverage the journalist's connections with D.C.-area media influencers. In January 2018, Fairbanks provided a complimentary ticket and VIP wristband for Manning to attend[59] "A Night for Freedom" hosted by Mike Cernovich. In reporting the "far-right pro-Trump bash," The Washington Post identified Cassandra Fairbanks as a "prominent far-right Internet figure."[7]

Chelsea Manning outside "A Night for Freedom" in New York City on January 20, 2018

Fairbanks later got involved in a public dispute with Manning, particularly over Manning's association of events Fairbanks invited her to with white supremacist-led violence at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.[59] "I really really really wanted to go along with everything because she has been through so much," Fairbanks tweeted, "but she equated me and my friends to Charlottesville knowing damn well that's bullshit. Sorry Chelsea, not cool."[60] Fairbanks insisted that "A Night for Freedom" was not a white supremacist event, and that Manning had been well received. "Tons of people went up to Chelsea and thanked her for what she did. Not one person was rude to her, even those who disagree with her actions. I would have impaled them with my stiletto if they had been—but our crowd isn't like that."[61]

The Gateway Pundit

In December 2017,[62] Fairbanks joined far-right[63] news and opinion website The Gateway Pundit as its Washington bureau chief.[11]

References
  1. Fairbanks, Cassandra. "Profile". Twitter. Archived from the original on May 29, 2020. Retrieved June 2, 2020.
  2. Fairbanks, Cassandra. "Profile". Facebook. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  3. Graves, Ginny (June 6, 2013). "Attention Rapists: You've Met Your Match". Glamour. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  4. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (June 26, 2019). "In case you missed it, I made a new website to cover the things I care about" (Tweet). Archived from the original on June 26, 2019. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  5. Marantz, Andrew (January 30, 2017). "Trump Supporters at the DeploraBall". The New Yorker. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  6. Swenson, Kyle (January 23, 2018). "Chelsea Manning showed up at a far-right pro-Trump bash, infuriating the far left". The Washington Post.
  7. Nelson, Rebecca (May 18, 2017). "Cassandra Fairbanks Loved Bernie Sanders. Now She's a Donald Trump Superfan". Cosmopolitan. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  8. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (April 22, 2020). "My family came to the US in 1633" (Tweet). Archived from the original on April 22, 2020. Retrieved April 22, 2020 – via Twitter.
  9. "The oldest Timber Frame House in North America". The Fairbanks House. Archived from the original on March 11, 2020. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  10. Marantz, Andrew (2019). Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. Viking Press.
  11. McKew, Molly (October 3, 2018). "Brett Kavanaugh and the Information Terrorists Trying to Reshape America". Wired. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  12. Regan, Helen (May 25, 2015). "The Fat-Shamed 'Dancing Man' Who Became an Internet Sensation Attends a Party in His Honor in L.A." Time. Retrieved June 1, 2020.
  13. "After Witnessing Cruelty Against Overweight Man, LA Group And Stars Offer To Throw Him A Dance Party". KCBS-TV. March 7, 2015. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  14. Todd, Bridget (May 27, 2015). "Man shamed for dancing in public gets star-studded dance party". MSNBC. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
  15. "Fat-shamed 'Dancing Man' parties in LA". News Corp Australia. May 25, 2015. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
  16. "Fat-shamed 'Dancing Man' gets star-studded dance party". SBS News. May 27, 2015. Retrieved June 1, 2020.
  17. Martin, Stephen and Joseph Marks (2019). Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don't, and Why. PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1541724389.
  18. "Panorama returns to peak time on BBC ONE". BBC One. July 18, 2006. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  19. Paxman, Jeremy (October 21, 2016). "Paxman on Trump v Clinton: Divided America". BBC World News. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  20. Reilly, Katie (January 22, 2017). "Read Hillary Clinton's 'Basket of Deplorables' Remarks on Trump Supporters". Time. Retrieved January 23, 2017.
  21. Lusher, Adam (January 20, 2017). "Donald Trump Inauguration: Violent clashes outside pro-Trump 'DeploraBall'". The Independent. Retrieved February 28, 2020.
  22. Jaffe, Sarah (January 19, 2017). "Trump Interruption: A Conversation with Legba Carrefour". The Baffler. Retrieved February 28, 2020.
  23. Hermann, Peter (March 7, 2017). "Protester pleads guilty to conspiring to disrupt DeploraBall for Trump supporters". The Washington Post. Retrieved February 28, 2020.
  24. Hermann, Peter and Theresa Vargas & Perry Stein (January 20, 2017). "Protesters vowed to shut down the city. Police vowed to protect the inauguration. They clashed". The Washington Post. Retrieved February 28, 2020.
  25. "Cassandra Fairbanks driven from home by Antifa rioters (here's how you can help)". Rebel News. June 2, 2020. Retrieved June 2, 2020.
  26. Holt, Jared (June 17, 2020). "Cassandra Fairbanks Claims Antifa Attacked Her. Police Reports and Neighbors Say Otherwise". Right Wing Watch. Retrieved June 17, 2020.
  27. Fairbanks, Cassandra (2014–2015). "Cassandra Fairbanks". Free Thought Project. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  28. Fairbanks, Cassandra (2015). "Conversations by @cassandrarules". PINAC News. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  29. Miller, Carlos (August 10, 2015). "PINAC Reporter Cassandra Fairbanks Live Streams Own Arrest". PINAC News. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  30. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (April 2, 2015). "no bylines at Sputnik, it's cool though" (Tweet). Archived from the original on January 4, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  31. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (April 2, 2015). "Heres my first article with Sputnik :)" (Tweet). Archived from the original on January 4, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  32. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (May 17, 2017). "It's my last day at Sputnik and it's so weird. I feel like I've been there forever" (Tweet). Archived from the original on January 4, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  33. Fairbanks, Cassandra (January–February 2016). "Cassandra Fairbanks". Teen Vogue. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  34. "Mike Cernovich". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  35. Hayden, Michael Edison (January 28, 2018). "Pro-Trump media personalities struggle to shake 'toxic waste' of 'alt-right' brand". Newsweek. Retrieved February 27, 2020.
  36. Shugerman, Emily (April 29, 2017). "Two members of alt-right accused of making white supremacist hand signs in White House after receiving press passes". The Independent. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  37. Bernstein, Joseph (June 1, 2017). "A Pro-Trump Writer Just Sued A Fusion Reporter For Accusing Her Of Making A "White Supremacist" Gesture". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  38. Eakin, Britain (June 7, 2018). "Writer Loses Defamation Claim Over Journalist's Tweet". Courthouse News Service. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  39. Fairbanks, Cassandra (April–November 2017). "Cassandra Fairbanks". Big League Politics. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  40. Gabriel, Trip and Michael M. Grynbaum (February 4, 2019). "With Northam Picture, Obscure Publication Plays Big Role in Virginia Politics". The New York Times. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  41. Fairbanks, Cassandra (October 25, 2017). "DC WHISPERS Exclusive: Washington Insider tells BLP what President Trump is asking about Seth Rich". Big League Politics. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  42. "Journalist subpoenaed for communications in ongoing defamation suit". U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Freedom of the Press Foundation. March 3, 2020. Retrieved March 3, 2020.
  43. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (February 1, 2020). "NPR lawyers are on 90 different drugs if they think I would ever give up a single sentence of a convo I've had with him" (Tweet). Archived from the original on February 2, 2020. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  44. Bertrand, Natasha (February 24, 2020). "Assange fight draws in Trump's new intel chief". Politico. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
  45. Vogel, Kenneth P. and Jeremy W. Peters (August 25, 2019). "Trump Allies Target Journalists Over Coverage Deemed Hostile to White House". The New York Times. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
  46. Palmeri, Tara; Castano, Aicha El Hammar (April 15, 2019). "US Gave Verbal Pledge of No Death Penalty for Assange". ABC News.
  47. Cassandra Fairbanks (February 25, 2020). The phone call (video). Periscope. Retrieved February 27, 2020.
  48. Goforth, Claire (February 27, 2020). "Far-right blogger claims Trump ordered arrest of Julian Assange". The Daily Dot. Retrieved February 27, 2020.
  49. Cassandra Fairbanks (February 25, 2020). So here's the story about that phone call and why I recorded it (video). Periscope. Retrieved February 27, 2020.
  50. Fairbanks, Cassandra (March 26, 2019). "Julian Assange Clashes With Ecuadorian Officials After Embassy Locks US Journalist in a Surveilled Room". Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Retrieved February 29, 2020.
  51. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (October 26, 2013). "I don't believe anyone has done anything as remarkable as Chelsea Manning in my lifetime" (Tweet). Archived from the original on January 4, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  52. Martinez, Luis and Arlette Saenz (August 21, 2013). "Bradley Manning Sentenced to 35 Years for Leaking Secrets". ABC News. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
  53. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (March 10, 2017). "I've been relentlessly supporting wikileaks since the first time I heard of them, and Manning" (Tweet). Archived from the original on January 4, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  54. Shubailai, Nadine (May 17, 2017). "Chelsea Manning released: The past 'is only my starting point, not my final destination'". ABC News.
  55. "Chelsea Manning addresses crowd of anti-fascist, anti-Milo marchers". Berkeleyside. September 24, 2017. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
  56. Deruy, Emily and Louis Hansen & Lisa P. White (September 23, 2017). "UC Berkeley's 'Free Speech Week' officially canceled, appeared to be set-up from the start". East Bay Times. Retrieved February 26, 2020. For Manning with Antifa see photo gallery images 3 and 6.
  57. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (September 23, 2017). "It's a real shame since many of us (like me) fought for her right to free speech for fucking years" (Tweet). Archived from the original on January 4, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  58. Burns, Katelyn (January 26, 2018). "Chelsea Manning on Her Alt-Right Partying: I Was a Spy, Not a Racist". The Daily Beast. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  59. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (January 26, 2018). "I really really really wanted to go along with everything because she has been through so much" (Tweet). Archived from the original on October 28, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  60. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (January 21, 2018). "Tons of people went up to Chelsea and thanked her for what she did" (Tweet). Archived from the original on October 25, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  61. Fairbanks, Cassandra [@CassandraRules] (December 13, 2017). "Former Young Turks Reporter @JordanChariton Sues HuffPost for $23.5 Million Over 'False Sexual Assault Allegations'" (Tweet). Archived from the original on January 4, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2020 – via Twitter.
  62. Darcy, Oliver; Gold, Hadas (February 15, 2018). "Far-right says FBI, distracted by Russia probe, missed warning signs in Florida shooting". CNN. Retrieved February 15, 2018. The Gateway Pundit, a far-right website known for peddling misinformation and conspiracy theories [...]

Further reading
  • Marantz, Andrew. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. Viking, 2019. ISBN 978-0525522263
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.